Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu (Flatiron Books) ~Janet Brown

What would you do if you knew you were faced with swift and inescapable annihilation? Who would you attempt to save? Who would you reach out to? What last words would you say? And what would you do, if you were given a second chance at being alive? 

An alert tears through a suburban town, bringing eighteen minutes of terror before another announcement proclaims it was a false alarm. Eighteen minutes, over quarter of an hour, is long enough to change a life and all over Beckitt, lives are changed.

In interlocking chapters, Vincent Yu strips away the facades of people who have believed that in Beckitt, "the only change was cyclic--the seasons, the school years." But now, after facing certain death for eighteen interminable minutes, nine people confront hidden disappointments, subterranean secrets, unwelcome discoveries, the nature of mortality. Changes are born from panic-fueled abandonment, from text messaging sent without consideration, from a piece of gossip that illuminates a teenage girl's view of her parents, from unexpected heroic clarity emerging in an addicted brain. 

What begins in the guise of a thriller becomes nine little novels, filled with fear, beauty, and redemption. Yu's characters are New England Chinese American (with one exception--the woman who discovers after her husband's fatal heart attack in the midst of the false alarm that he had fathered a son with a woman named Emma Chou). Beckitt is small enough that these lives intersect in ways that are sometimes incidental, sometimes life-changing. 

Yu shows these links with subtlety, in quiet surprises, letting readers make those discoveries on their own. The true revelations are in his portrayals of his characters, the details that make them and their stories shine. He offers a man whose parents "were fully assimilated...for whom culture was more hobby than identity," a woman who shows her loss of tension as "her cheeks were loosening like sails," a wife whose "soul was a sky."  A widower backs away from a new friendship because of the woman's "swaying anchor of her need.” A man with a broken heart finds comfort in the irresistible seduction of fentanyl, "astonishing in its comprehensive pleasure."

A catalogue of what a marriage consists of when a couple is "old enough to know how silly it was to make blanket declarations, and old enough to make them, regardless" shows monogamy in all of its "expansive sweetness." A quick sentence near the novel's end gives a happy ending to a man who had been buried by "some inner brokenness." A dissolution of humanity in a nursing home as the alert unites employees in anarchy evokes The Lord of the Flies.  "A thundering sickening shock" is supplanted by "a warm flicker of hope," even though the blaring alert says death is on its way, coming through a "ripped-open procession of clouds."

Seek Immediate Shelter is a book that made at least one reader fall in love with its flawed and frightened characters going through reentry, facing revelations and truths, loss and discovery. It's a reminder of the untapped resilience that everyone contains without realizing it's there. It's a book written for our time, not easy but restorative, showing up when we need it most.